I believe Yngwie Malmsteem also made the comment about Brian's sound coming from his fingers and his brain, just as much as it comes from his guitar. Somebody on this forum mentioned some time ago.

It's always nice to read good things about the Doctor. With all his Soapbox ranting I sometimes forget he is a personal hero of mine, as well as a legendary and well respected musician among his peers.

The Bonus disc of Meat Loaf's 3 Bats Live 2-DVD set has short interviews wiht many of the poeple who participated in the making of the album Bat out Of Hell 3. As y'all probably already know, Brian played guitar on one of the songs.

One of the peope interviewed is Steve Vai and he says that his most memorable experience of working on the album was workign with Brian. This made me so happy :-)

i've tried many times to get into steve vai but without success. i must admit i'm not a big fan of ultra fast players. i do have the first few lps of satriani, he seems more melodic. his track 'flying in a blue dream' is my favourite guitar instrumental.

twenty years ago i did have a thing for malmsteen, but after a few years got bored of him, he seems to samey to me. his trilogy album is very good though.

chris the unhappy sheep wrote: i've tried many times to get into steve vai but without success. i must admit i'm not a big fan of ultra fast players. i do have the first few lps of satriani, he seems more melodic. his track 'flying in a blue dream' is my favourite guitar instrumental.

twenty years ago i did have a thing for malmsteen, but after a few years got bored of him, he seems to samey to me. his trilogy album is very good though. ------ Please, name ONE SONG where Steve plays ultra fast licks. In all of his albums, I wasn't able to find a single one.

Eddie Van Halen may not be the fastest player, but he is the one person in rock who has ever made it cool to be technical. Thousands of guys have followed and tried to better him, and most have failed. Plenty of them had better chops, but they didn't have Eddie's accessibility, which is what it's all about in the end.

"The more generous you are with your music, the more it comes back to you." -- Dan Lampinski

Eddie is one of my favourite players, I'd like to say in the first place but making accessible music is not everyone's goal. Not that it's easy to achieve that, of course but writting music is all about being able to put your knowledge in it. You can be as good as you want to be or you can completely suck but composition is about knowledge. You do what you know how to do. If not... then you just don't.

That's something obvious but, you know... Eddie Van Halen had something which 95% of most guitar players lack: BRAINS. Sure, he was a fucking kid when he kicked everyone's ass by playing in a way that most would have wanted but none had thought about how doing it... but that's just a part of him. Of course Eruption is a musical revolution itself but that's just a part of him... which is very insignificant compared to his following guitar work because most of the time, he knew what he was doing and played a lot of different things, tried a lot of stuff and that's what makes him the great player he is. When he tried to play things, he succeeded.

Take for example, the solo from Can't Stop Loving You. It's so short and YET, there are so many things going on. Just 4 bars or so but lots of variations and greatly played.

Most of guitar players just play a solo (which can be awesome or not, doesn't matter) on any song... and they can't justify why it's really there. I mean, you could take it off and the song would be the same.

Only a few guys can make every note count... like, you know it's there because IT HAS to be there. Not just because it's guitar solo time.

This has nothing to do with playing fast or not, because most people seem to think that playing fast is a bad thing. Have you ever heard of something as ridiculous as that? Not liking something because "it's too fast"?